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Humanitarian Versus Development Aid for Refugees: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
Assistance to refugees living in camps is shifting from a humanitarian model, based on care and maintenance, to a development model that promotes refugee self-reliance through income-generating activities, market development, and cash transfers. Evidence on the effects of this paradigm shift is limited. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design, this paper tests whether the adoption of a development approach to refugee assistance in a new settlement in Kenya has a positive impact. We find that refugees benefiting from the new approach have better diets and perceive themselves as happier and more independent from humanitarian aid. We find no effect on assets and employment. These effects appear to be driven by the switch from food rations to cash transfers and by the wider promotion of kitchen gardens. Our findings argue in favor of the development approach to refugee assistance, which is cheaper and leads to better outcomes.
Nolosha Dhaqaale ee Qaxootiga ku Nool Dollo Ado [Somali translation of ‘Refugee Economies in Dollo Ado’]
This report, in Somali, examines the economic strategies of Somali refugees in the cross-border economy of Ethiopia’s Somali region. The five Dollo Ado refugee camps were created between 2009 and 2011 in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. According to UNHCR registration data, they host around 220,000 almost exclusively Somali refugees within a semi-arid and isolated border district within which refugees outnumber the host population. The camps and host community have benefited significantly from the IKEA Foundation’s €75m investment in the camps over a seven-year period. This globally unprecedented level of private sector investment has created a range of new opportunities in education, entrepreneurship, energy, agriculture, the environment, and livelihoods. [Report translated into Somali by Maimuna Mohamud.]
Return: voluntary, safe, dignified and durable?
Voluntary return in safety and with dignity has long been a core tenet of the international refugee regime. In the 23 articles on ‘Return’ in this issue of FMR, authors explore various obstacles to achieving sustainable return, discuss the need to guard against premature or forced return, and debate the assumptions and perceptions that influence policy and practice. This issue also includes a mini-feature on ‘Towards understanding and addressing the root causes of displacement’.
the ETHICS issue
We each live according to our own personal code of ethics but what moral principles guide our work? The 19 feature theme articles in this issue debate many of the ethical questions that confront us in programming, research, safeguarding and volunteering, and in our use of data, new technologies, messaging and images. Prepare to be enlightened, unsettled and challenged. This issue is being published in tribute to Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of the Refugee Studies Centre and FMR, who died in July 2018.
Transnationalism
About the book: The SAGE Handbook of International Migration provides an authoritative and informed analysis of key issues in international migration, including its crucial significance far beyond the more traditional questions of immigrant settlement and incorporation in particular countries. The last three decades have seen the rapid increase and diversification in the types of international migration, and this Handbook has been created to meet the need among academics and researchers across the social sciences, policy makers and commentators for a definitive publication which provides a range of perspectives and insights into key themes and debates in the field.
Syrian refugees’ return from Lebanon
As the Assad regime regains control in most parts of Syria, Syrian refugees are under increasing pressure to return from neighbouring countries including Lebanon. Analysis of the complex political landscape and of current return practices, however, shows that much needs to be done to ensure Syrians can return voluntarily in safety and dignity.
Social Transformation and Migration: National and Local Experiences in South Korea, Turkey, Mexico and Australia
This book examines theories and specific experiences of international migration and social transformation, with special reference to the effects of neo-liberal globalization on four societies with vastly different historical and cultural characteristics: South Korea, Australia, Turkey and Mexico.
Educating Palestinian refugees: The origins of UNRWA’s unique schooling system
This article examines the origins of the unique schooling system for Palestinian refugees run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Examining developments c. 1950–57, it illuminates the programme’s beginning and explores the objectives of those behind it. Using archival evidence from numerous international welfare organizations and testimonies from refugees themselves, this article argues that the parties providing education and the refugees receiving it often had conflicting objectives that were highly politicized on both sides. Despite the comparatively greater power and resources of the United Nations, the Palestinian refugees were able to make use of their limited leverage in order to shape the education system as they preferred. The UNRWA education programme thus serves as a revealing case study for explaining developmental aid to refugee populations and its inevitable intersection with politics.
Is Jerusalem international or Palestinian? Rethinking UNGA Resolution 181
On 29 November 1947, the nascent UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution 181. This would go down in history as the infamous partition plan that proposed carving Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, with the latter taking more than half (55.5 percent) of the land.2 Resolution 181 would come to dominate the UN’s relationship with the Palestinian people, its significance so pronounced that the UNGA later commemorated 29 November as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.3 As the eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi has observed, partition subsequently became the paradigm around which much of the discourse on the so-called “Palestine problem” has been structured.4 UN Resolution 181 did not only propose partition, however.
Rejecting resettlement: The case of the Palestinians
Palestinian rejection of resettlement was driven by political concerns. This case study shows the importance of engaging directly with refugees when devising durable solutions. Over their seven decades as a large-scale refugee population, the Palestinians have been remarkably consistent in collectively opposing resettlement as a durable solution to their plight. Both the grass roots and later the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) have repudiated any suggestion of third-country resettlement on the grounds that it would undermine the Palestinians’ political and national rights as a people. Host-country integration was similarly spurned.
UNRWA and the Palestinian precedent: Lessons from the international response to the Palestinian refugee crisis
Considering the major refugee crises currently facing the world, this essay argues that an examination of earlier refugee crises is needed in order to devise an effective international response today. On this basis, it assesses the unique international system that was set up in response to one of the largest refugee crises of the twentieth century: that of the Palestinians. Like the Syrian refugee crisis today, the Palestinian case encapsulated the connection between global politics and mass migration. On this basis, this article evaluates the merits of the international organization responsible for serving the Palestinian refugees: the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Identifying and assessing the key features of the UNRWA system, the essay argues that its uniqueness generated both benefits and many disadvantages for the Palestinian refugees it served. In particular, the Palestinians’ ineligibility for UNHCR services has left them uniquely vulnerable when seeking international protection. Creating a similar international organization to serve Syrian refugees today is likely to cause similar problems, and will raise the question of whether other large refugee populations also need their own UN agencies. However, the internationalist rationale behind the UNRWA system is also contrasted harshly with the current imbalance in the response to the Syrian crisis, whereby a small number of countries are hosting the majority of the refugees. Thus despite its considerable flaws, UNRWA’s precedent still provides important lessons for the crisis today.
Frozen frontier: uti possidetis and the decolonization of South Asia
The study of uti possidetis in international law has proceeded without any detailed examination of its application to South Asian borders. Yet, the consequences of uti possidetis in the Indian subcontinent offer critical insight into the legal and functional critique levied against the doctrine. The South Asian experience provides evidence that uti possidetis cannot be considered a norm of regional customary international law, confined to Latin America and Africa. Simultaneously, it provides compelling proof of this doctrine’s ruinous impact on self-determination, pointing to its potential for identity-alteration and intra-state violence: consequences that have received scarce attention in legal scholarship. By undertaking a detailed study of the Radcliffe Line in Punjab, this paper makes a prudent attempt to commence filling this gap in the literature by re-centring South Asia in the debate on uti possidetis.
Beyond the boxes: Refugee shelter and the humanitarian politics of life
Humanitarian agencies often reach for new designs and technologies in order to meet basic human needs. In the field of emergency shelter, one of the most widely publicized new designs is the Ikea refugee shelter: a flat‐packed, mass‐produced structure that can be shipped and constructed wherever it is required. This shelter aspires to be a universal solution, but since its formal launch in 2013, it has met with criticism and many challenges in the field. Deployed in political contexts in which people have very different expectations of basic shelter, the Ikea shelter demonstrates the limitations of universal standards, the inequities of humanitarianism, and the entwinement of biopolitics and the politics of life.
Refugee Economies in Addis Ababa: Towards Sustainable Opportunities for Urban Communities
This report examines the precarious economic lives of refugee communities in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and their interactions with the host community. Addis Ababa has only 22,000 registered refugees, out of a national refugee population of 900,000. They comprise two main groups: 17,000 Eritreans and 5000 Somali refugees. Based on qualitative research and a survey of 2441 refugees and members of the proximate host community, we examine the economic lives of the refugee communities and their interactions with the host community. We draw upon the data to consider the prospects for a sustainable urban response in the context of Ethiopia’s adoption of the new Refugee Proclamation in 2019, which appears to provide refugees with the right to work and freedom of movement.
Refugee Economies in Dollo Ado: Development Opportunities in a Border Region of Ethiopia
This report examines the economic strategies of Somali refugees in the cross-border economy of Ethiopia’s Somali region. The five Dollo Ado refugee camps were created between 2009 and 2011 in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. According to UNHCR registration data, they host around 220,000 almost exclusively Somali refugees within a semi-arid and isolated border district within which refugees outnumber the host population. The camps and host community have benefited significantly from the IKEA Foundation’s €75m investment in the camps over a seven-year period. This globally unprecedented level of private sector investment has created a range of new opportunities in education, entrepreneurship, energy, agriculture, the environment, and livelihoods.
The Kalobeyei Model: Towards Self-Reliance for Refugees?
This report outlines a conceptual model and indicators for measuring refugee self-reliance, and applies it to the Kalobeyei settlement and Kakuma refugee camps context. The Kalobeyei settlement was opened in Turkana County in Kenya in 2016 with the intention of promoting the self-reliance of refugees and the host population and delivering integrated services to both. Its development is now guided by the Kalobeyei Integrated Social and Economic Development Programme (KISEDP), led by the Government of Kenya (GoK), the Turkana County Government, UNHCR, and partners. KISEDP envisions a range of innovative, market-based approaches to refugee protection that diverge from the conventional aid model implemented in Kakuma. These include cash-based programmes to meet housing, nutritional and other material needs, training to capitalise on the skills and entrepreneurial potential of refugees and hosts, and agricultural projects to promote dryland farming and household ‘kitchen gardens’. This report is based upon a 3-year study following newly arrived refugees integrated into the new Kalobeyei settlement and the old Kakuma refugee camp since 2016. The newly arrived refugees were allocated between the two contexts based on their date of arrival. In the study, we follow newly arrived South Sudanese refugee in both Kalobeyei and Kakuma in order to compare outcomes over time, and identify what difference the Kalobeyei settlement makes in comparison to the Kakuma model. We also follow newly arrived Ethiopian and Burundian refugees within Kalobeyei. The report covers two waves of data collection with the same randomly sampled respondent population, carried out in 2017 and 2018.
Doing Business in Kakuma: Refugees, Entrepreneurship, and the Food Market
This report draws upon a business survey with food retailers to assess the impact of the ‘Bamba Chakula’ model of electronic food transfers and business contracts. The Kakuma refugee camps have become popularly associated with entrepreneurship. In 2016, the Kalobeyei settlement was opened 3.5 kms away from the Kakuma camps, with the intention of promoting the self-reliance of refugees and the host population, and delivering integrated services to both. Its development is guided by the Kalobeyei Integrated Social and Economic Development Programme (KISEDP), which offers a range of innovative, market-based approaches to refugee protection that diverge from the conventional aid model implemented in Kakuma. There have been few studies that examine the emergence of refugee-led markets at the business level, whether in the Kakuma camps, in the Kalobeyei settlement, or elsewhere. In order to address this gap, our research aimed to study one particular sector: the food market. This sector is of particular interest because it is such a significant part of economic life in refugee camps, and because it is heavily shaped by the modalities of food assistance provided by the international community. Kakuma is currently undergoing a gradual transition from in-kind food assistance to cash-based assistance, and as an interim step, it has introduced a food provision model called Bamba Chakula.
Research in Brief: Avoiding refugee status and alternatives to asylum
This new research brief outlines why, in the context of a specific displaced population in Uganda, individuals choose to avoid the asylum system, and what alternatives they both pursue and would prefer to it. Their responses point towards a practical set of changes that could significantly enhance protection within the asylum system in this context. But they also point towards a preference for legal pathways to regularising individuals’ statuses that are discrete from the refugee regime and its labels. The brief is based on research conducted with Eritreans in Kampala in late 2016.
Integration of resettled Syrian refugees in Oxford: preliminary study in 2018
This working paper presents findings from the first phase of research on Understanding the Integration of Syrian Refugee Families in Oxfordshire, based at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. The study aims to understand the ways and degrees to which Syrian refugee families who came to Oxfordshire via the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme (SVPRS) are adapting to their new lives in the United Kingdom. In response to the Syrian refugee crisis and calls for countries in the Global North to do more, the UK government launched the SVPRS in 2014. In 2015, the then prime minister David Cameron announced intentions to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees from the Middle East and North Africa to the UK by May 2020 through the SVPRS. By the end December 2016, 5,454 refugees had been resettled in the UK through this scheme, spread across 200 local authorities. This study seeks to investigate the integration processes experienced by these Syrian families, with the aim of highlighting policy implications for local authorities and refugee-supporting agencies. At the inception of data collection in 2018, a total of 28 families had been received in Oxford via SVPRS. For this initial round of research, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 families out of the 28, and also interviewed staff members from Oxford City Council, community-based groups, and refugee-assisting NGOs between January and July 2018.